There is also another side of the picture. Doctor Holmes does not forget the trials of authorship. The writer who attains a certain measure of popularity "will be startled to find himself the object of an embarrassing devotion, and almost appropriation, by some of his parish of readers. He will blush at his lonely desk, as he reads the extravagances of expression which pour over him like the oil which ran down upon the beard of Aaron, and even down to the skirts of his garments--an extreme unction which seems hardly desirable. We ought to have his photograph as he reads one of those frequent missives, oftenest traced, we may guess, in the delicate, slanting hand which betrays the slender fingers of the sympathetic sisterhood. "A slight sense of the ridiculous at being made so much of qualifies the placid tolerance with which the rhymester or the essayist sees himself preferred to the great masters in prose and verse, and reads his name glowing in a halo of epithets which might belong to Bacon or Milton. We need not grudge him such pleasure as he may derive from the illusion of a momentary revery, in which he dreams of himself as clad in royal robes and exalted among the immortals. The next post will probably bring him some slip from a newspaper or critical journal, which will strip him of his regalia, as Thackeray, in one of his illustrations, has disrobed and denuded the grand monarque. He saw himself but a moment ago a colossal figure in a drapery of rhetorical purple, ample enough for an Emperor, as Bernini would clothe him. The image breaker has passed by, belittling him by comparison, jostling him off his pedestal, levelling his most prominent feature, or even breaking a whole ink bottle against him as the indignant moralist did on the figure in the vestibule of the opera house--the shortest and most effective satire that ever came from that fountain of approval and commendation. Such are some of the varied experiences of authorship." Out of his literary career as a successful writer, Doctor Holmes was able to formulate many rules for the self-protection of authors, which were adopted unanimously at an authors' association which was held in Washington last September, and the remainder of his "talk" is devoted to extracts from their proceedings. Appended are a few of them: